What's up with the new city councilors? What have they been up to since the election?

I saw both Felix Arroyo and Ayanna Pressley at the Coakley election-night party. (Neither endorsed her, but both stopped by.) I didn't get a chance to speak with Arroyo, but I did chat with Pressley. She's working on putting her staff together, and talking with council President Mike Ross about what role she might take, in terms of committees.

What, if anything, does Scott Brown need to do and need to happen to beat Coakley in January?

I saw this Star Trek episode once, where a rift in the space-time continuum froze everybody motionless within a certain area, while time kept moving forward outside of that rift. If that happens, leaving only the greater Wrentham area unaffected, Brown's got a chance.

I truly have no idea, and I suspect he doesn't either. I don't think he'll turn right around and run for DA against Dan Conley -- although if Conley isn't running for one reason or another, he might be tempted. I can't picture him jumping into one of the statewide races.

--There's been a lot of talk about powerful-man adultery of late, what with Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Tiger Woods, and even a whole TV series, The Good Wife, about the topic. So this prompts me to mention yet again one of my pet peeves of 2008: the lack of public discussion about John and Cindy McCain's adulterous beginnings.

In this week's issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I write about the state of flux in Massachusetts politics, and why it's likely to lead to extreme gridlock on Beacon Hill after the new year.

I've got little or nothing useful to tell you at this stage of the game (so, if you're hoping to be the next AG, just keep your britches cool for a while). Boston looks like it's going to have lower turnout than the Mayoral primary, probably a little under 20%. Somerville -- Capuano's home base -- looks a little higher. The rest of the state is low, low, low, from what I'm hearing.

One of the long-time tricks concerning campaign contributions is that at some point there is a final pre-election campaign-finance report -- which means that all contributions after that don't become public until after the election (when it's too late to matter, and journalists no longer care enough to look). So, you tend to get a lot of lobbyists and PACs and other shady characters waiting until after the last report to make their contributions; kind of an undercover dirty-money dump.

I think Joan Vennochi's column today
about Coakley facing an "old boys network" impediment for endorsements is partly
accurate and partly off the mark. It's certainly true that political officeholders, especially direct colleagues, tend to help one another back and
forth over time, and since Massachusetts politics has been so
male-dominated for so many years, that means men owing men in those
favor banks.

--OK, we've had the two televised debates. No big gaffes or triumphs. That presumably favors the incumbent -- unless the incumbent is in a tailspin that she needed to halt. I think you'd have to say that the candidates acted as though they believe their own claims about internal polling that I reported here yesterday. That is, Coakley acted like someone protecting a sizable lead, not someone fighting off a serious challenge, while the others acted like they had to maneuver against each other (ie, for the votes falling away from Coakley), not like they had to knock the frontrunner off a 20-point perch.

Sources with two Senate campaigns tell the Phoenix that their latest polling shows the Democratic primary race significantly tightening. But a source with the Coakley campaign says that their latest polling shows that the race is not tightening.

It's always important to be wary of internal polling -- especially, as in these cases, when they haven't shown me the actual materials.